


Insomnia

by fanfoolishness (LoonyLupin), LoonyLupin



Series: A Pocketful of Eezo: Xia Shepard x Tali'Zorah vas Normandy [4]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Mass Effect 2, Paragade (Mass Effect), Quarians, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 18:39:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9838382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoonyLupin/pseuds/fanfoolishness, https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoonyLupin/pseuds/LoonyLupin
Summary: Shepard hasn't been himself lately, but Tali helps remind him it's okay to ask for help.





	

Tali watched as Garrus queued up in the line for Citadel rapid transit back to the Normandy.  She waited a ways back; no sense in all of them standing in line.  Beside her Shepard fidgeted, shifting his feet as he stood.  He still looked angry, those red scars on his cheeks almost pulsing with it. **  
**

He’d seemed angrier ever since whatever Cerberus had done to him to bring him back.  He’d been less patient, more prone to taking risks, more likely to forget the diplomacy and just let loose.  Sometimes she thought he went too far, and she fretted about him; wondered what he was thinking, why he had chosen a certain course of action.  Other times she was glad of his fury.  Like now.

Racist bosh’tets, accusing Lia’Vael first of thievery, then of vagrancy.  When she was on pilgrimage!  Tali’s hand curled into a fist at her side.  She’d been enraged, and unable to keep from stepping in to defend the other quarian.  There had been a brief moment when she’d wondered, had she gone too far?  Drawn the wrath of C-Sec?  Worse, would Shepard would be disappointed in her?

She laughed to herself.  Of course Shepard had had her back.  How could she have thought otherwise?

“Thank you,” she said.  “For standing up to them back there.”

Shepard glanced at her, his grim look relaxing.  “They needed someone to take them down a notch,” he said.  “That girl did _nothing_ wrong.  For them to go after her like that just because she’s a quarian – well, it’s bullshit, Tali.”

“I know it is,” she said, some of her anger dissipating in the comfort of their shared disapproval.  She edged toward him, laying a light touch on his arm before quickly withdrawing it.  “You didn’t have to say anything, as a human, but you did anyway.  I’m grateful for it.  I know Lia’Vael is, too.”

He smiled, the lines around his eyes softening.  She’d missed the way it looked on him.  She had always liked how free humans were with their smiles.  They happened for everything – jokes, diplomacy, easing a mood, even nervousness.  They were ubiquitous, but no less fascinating for it.  

Quarian smiles were secret; they’d come to rely on the change in voice instead, the shift of a raised hand, the tilt of a mask.   It was a pity the antibacterial treatments of their envirosuit visors rendered them somewhat opaque.  She wished he could see she smiled back.

“I’m still a Spectre,” Shepard explained.  “I can use it.  I’ll send a message to Bailey when we get back about that officer; that kind of prejudice is inexcusable.  Cracking down on crime and security is one thing, but that asshole just gets off on being bigger than somebody else.  I’ve been the little guy before.  I won’t put up with it now.”  He paused, his grin fading.  “Did shit like that happen to you on the Citadel?  Before we met?”

Tali crossed her arms, sighing.  She didn’t like to think about it.  “It’s… hard to say.  I really wasn’t here for very long before we met.  Everything with Saren and the geth happened so fast.”

“You aren’t telling me everything,” he pointed out.  “You’re great at a lot of things, Tali; lying’s not one of them.”

“I’m not lying,” she protested, though part of her thrilled to know he could read her so well.  Other races usually had trouble telling what exactly was going on in a quarian’s head, deprived of facial expressions.  “It was only a few days on the Citadel before I met you.  But you’re right.  I was shot, and I was bleeding through my suit before I found Dr. Michel.  Nobody even spared a glance at the quarian with her own blood all over her hands.”  She looked down at them, flexing her fingers, remembering.

The red scars on Shepard’s face were stark against his skin.  He swore.  “I guess I should have expected that, people being what they are.”  He considered, his hand idly playing over the holster of his pistol.  “But I don’t like it.”

“The thought is appreciated, Shepard.  I admit, it was quite satisfying to see you take these two down today,” said Tali.  “When it happened to me, I did not stand up for myself as I should have.  But you scared them.  Properly.”

Something about her word choice seemed to bother him.  His brows knit together as he mulled her comment over.  “Seems I’m getting good at that lately.  Scaring people,” said Shepard, half to himself.  The scars seemed redder than ever as he shook his head, suddenly quiet.

She debated for a moment how to respond.  She decided not to let his comment slide, acutely aware that he might still attempt to laugh it off.  “Well… that’s true.  Scaring them was welcome here, but you seem on edge in general.  Is everything all right?”

“Hm?” he asked.  He adjusted his visor, though it did not really need it, snug as it was.  He fiddled with it for a moment before responding.  “Things are – I’m fine, Tali.  I just don’t play as well with others anymore.”  He shrugged.  “Being dead’ll do things to you.  I don’t advise it.”

“Noted,” said Tali.  She watched as Garrus beckoned them forward, a rapid transit vehicle humming in front of him, its doors open.  She and Shepard made their way forward.  “If you ever wanted to talk about it,” she said, “I would listen.”

He glanced at her, appearing… hopeful, she thought.  “Yeah.  Okay,” he said.  “I think that’d help.”  

Garrus took the front passenger seat of the vehicle, and Tali climbed into the back.  As she did, she felt Shepard’s hand, a light, careful touch on the back of her shoulder, guiding her into the car.  Too soon he pulled his hand away, and she settled into her seat, breathing deeply.  

* * *

Shepard woke up suddenly, sweat on his brow, his body uncomfortably twisted and tangled in the covers.  He groaned, glancing up at the stars streaming innocently across the skylight.  He’d thought it frivolous at first.  Now he extricated himself from the blankets, sat up with his arms resting on his knees, and watched the stars.  The sweat on his face cooled, then dried.

He glanced at his omni-tool.  It was 0345, far too early for any reasonable person to be awake.  He sighed.  He hadn’t been sleeping well.  Not since –

_Panicked, heart thumping in his chest so fast he could not count the beats, hungry for air, starving for it, hands flailing at the ruptured lines and the oxygen hemorrhaging from his suit –_

He trembled, and got out of bed.

Some nights when this happened, he stayed in his quarters.  No need to alarm the skeleton night crew by fostering rumors the commander couldn’t sleep.  He’d blast his music, pounding club songs with a fast beat he tried to keep up with.  He did close-quarters exercises, push-ups, planks, crunches.  Then he’d stand in the shower, the water as hot as EDI would let him make it, inhaling the thick steam and letting the water trickle over his head, his face, his body.  It _was_ his body, wasn’t it?  Some nights he wasn’t sure.

Other nights he was too sick of his quarters to stay, and he dutifully dressed in Cerberus fatigues and wandered his way through the ship.  He mostly stuck to corridors, not wanting to disturb anyone.  Sometimes EDI asked after him, her volume down lower than normal, checking in on him.  He knew she would send this info back to Miranda and the Illusive Man, but he couldn’t make himself care.

Tonight he didn’t bother with exercises.  He felt too stiff after the uncomfortable sleeping position he had been in.  He pulled his fatigues on, thinking of earlier today.  He’d been glad to help that quarian, glad to have something righteous to channel his anger into.  Too often it had been flaring at little things instead.  It was good to have it _mean_ something this time.

He thought of Tali, her pride in him, the way she’d stood up for one of her own.  He loved that about her.  It seemed that two years out from her pilgrimage, she’d grown steely where she needed it, but kept her compassion when she needed that, too.  He liked it.

Her words resonated in his head. _If you ever wanted to talk about it, I’d listen._  

Before he could stop himself, he dashed off a quick message to her.   _Couldn’t sleep.  How about you? - Shepard_

The message disappeared, and Shepard closed down his omni-tool, annoyed at his own impulsivity.  He was being presumptuous.  Surely she’d be asleep like any sane person right now; surely if she was awake, she’d rather be focused on her engineering work than… than whatever he might hope to talk about.

“Stupid,” he muttered.  He finished lacing up his boots and got to his feet.  A ping from his omni-tool startled him.

_I was craving a midnight snack.  I’m in the mess, if you want some company. - Tali’Zorah_

Despite the tiredness nagging at him, despite the ache in his back and the crick in his neck, he read the message and smiled.

The elevator outside his room was empty.  It descended, nearly soundlessly, to the third level.  He stepped out to find her.

She was sitting alone at the large table in the mess area, a vid playing at low volume in front of her.  He could just make out turian subharmonics, followed by the mechanical undercurrent of a quarian voice.  A few packets of dextro food sat, discarded, beside her.  She glanced up when she saw him approaching.

“Shepard.  Hey,” she said, shutting the vid down, her omni-tool winking out.  “If you were hoping for the last of the dextro pepper soup, I’m afraid you’re too late.”

“Is it any good, this stuff?” Shepard asked, taking the seat across from her.

Tali chuckled.  “It’s pretty bad.  There is a little more variety here than there was on the first Normandy, but it’s still terribly artificial.  I miss the food back on the migrant fleet sometimes.  We didn’t always eat it as food – sometimes you were too busy to sterilize a full dish, and you didn’t want to take the risk you might get an infection if something slipped in when you had your suit open to eat… So a lot of the time, you’d just eat things boiled down as a paste through the suit.  But now and then, special occasions, family dinners… it was nice to sit down to something that was still recognizable as food.”  

“What sort of things did you eat there?  I’m guessing quarians don’t have much room for raising animals to eat,” said Shepard, looking at the crumpled rations next to her.  He was surprised to realize he had never thought about it much before.  A clear oversight on his part.

“Exactly,” said Tali.  “Our meals were all grain and vegetable-based.  A lot of it is turian in origin – you can’t buy any other type of dextro seeds – but we do have some heirloom varieties of plants from Rannoch.  I wonder if the geth have bothered to keep things growing on the homeworld.”  She fell silent for a moment.  “Probably not.”

Shepard winced.  He hadn’t meant to make her feel forlorn about the quarians’ lost homeworld.  He suddenly remembered one of the last times he’d talked to Tali, just before the Collector attack that had destroyed the SR-1, and how he might improve her mood.   “Do we have mintrose tea for you?” he asked.  “On board, I mean?  I thought it was your favorite.”

Tali waved a three-fingered hand at him.  “It is,” she said, sounding delighted.  “I can’t believe you remembered.  But no, I haven’t seen any around.”

“We’ll find some,” said Shepard.  “We’ve got to make sure you’re performing at peak capacity.  If you need tea, we’ll get you tea.”  He grinned at her.

She laughed, the sound bright beneath the mechanics of her helmet.  “Okay, Shepard.  We’ll go shopping the next time we are on the Citadel.”

He almost blurted _it’s a date_ and stopped himself, biting his lip.  He _must’ve_ been tired.  He rubbed at his face with his hand.  

“So why are you up so late, Shepard?” she asked, lacing her fingers together atop the table.  “We quarians don’t need to sleep as long as humans.  I’ve gotten used to late nights on my own when the crew is resting.  What’s your excuse?”

Shepard leaned back in his chair, running his hands over the tops of his thighs.  He considered.  “I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes,” he ventured.  “Or, it’s hard to get to sleep in the first place.”  A thought struck him.  “Do quarians dream?”

Tali’s thumbs tapped back and forth over her laced fingers.  “Sometimes,” said Tali.  “I don’t think it’s like human dreams, though, from what I’ve read.  I don’t have them very often.  When I do, it’s just vague feelings, or flashes of memories that are fainter than they are when I’m awake.  But humans can create whole new worlds in their dreams, right?  Sort of like what asari can do?”

“Not exactly,” Shepard clarified.  “We don’t control it like they do, and you can’t show someone else your dream.  It’s like our brains recycle things we’re thinking about while we sleep, and stitch the pieces back together.  It can feel _very_ real, and sometimes dreams are pretty damned weird.  Sometimes, they’re hard to forget.”  His fingers curled into the fabric of his fatigues, hard enough to pinch his skin.  He didn’t want to say it out loud.  

“Is that what a nightmare is, when you can’t forget?” asked Tali quietly.  “Do you have them?”

He swallowed.  He looked at her, noting the overhead lights glinting off her amethyst faceplate, the glimmer of her eyes, the slight angle of her helmet that said that she was listening.  That she wanted to help him.  It meant more than he could say.

“Yeah.  I have nightmares,” said Shepard hoarsely.  He cleared his throat.  The angle of the light off Tali’s helmet shifted, as if she was peering more closely at him.  “Sometimes it’s the beacon and the Protheans.  Or Virmire, and Ash.”  He closed his eyes.  “Elysium, too, sometimes.  I know we won, I know we made it, but there was a lot of death that day.  It’s not something you forget.”  He gazed up at the ceiling, squinting at the fluorescent light.  He was so _tired_.  “But lately, it’s shit like… getting spaced.”

Tali was very still, her hands stiff on the table in front of her.  “Keelah, Shepard.  You… remember it?”  

He felt cold.  He ignored the goosebumps on his arms beneath his fatigues.  He still couldn’t bring himself to look at her again, not when talking was this difficult.  “I was… starving for air.  And fucking _scared_.  I remember trying to stop the leak, trying to see which way the escape pod launched.  I was so dizzy – everything was dark –  And then that’s it.”

“Shepard, I never realized,” Tali began, sounding pained, but he couldn’t stop now that he’d started.

“The next thing I knew, I was in a Cerberus lab.  Two years later.  And it’s like my brain keeps trying to fill in that gap, like it’s missing code, just something else to hack; like if I get that last piece I’ll be fine again –”  His hands gestured in front of him, jerky, erratic.  “It just keeps playing, stupid fears, impossible science fiction bullshit, all sorts of things like maybe I came back _wrong_ , maybe I’m not really _me_ –”

Her hand, firm, steady, on his forearm made him stop.  Her grip was solid.  Reassuring.  He stopped his frantic gesticulation, and he forced himself to focus on her.

She leaned toward him, her helmet tilted upright, the shape of her shoulders speaking to concern.  “I thought it might be something like that.  I _have_ been worried about you.”

For a moment his mouth went dry.  Was it possible he really wasn’t himself?  

“You’ve been angrier.  Sometimes you have been… erratic,” she said, her hand squeezing his arm comfortingly.  “Tearing into that volus and that C-Sec officer like that.  You’re more likely to shoot first, ask questions later.  And there was that night in the Dark Star club a few weeks ago.  I’ve seen people drink too much when they are having fun, Shepard… but you weren’t having fun, were you?”

He shook his head, sliding his arm away from her, too tired to feel embarrassed about that night.  He could hardly remember it, anyway; just a flash of memory of being on his hands and knees in the bathroom, music pounding in his ears, Tali and Thane getting him back up on his feet, a sick taste in his mouth.  “Honestly, I think I thought it would help me sleep.  I know it was stupid.  I lost control.”

“I’ve been concerned.  But you _are_ you, Shepard,” said Tali urgently.  “I can see it in your face.  In your eyes.”

“Even with these scars?” he said, running his fingertips over the rough marks on his cheeks beneath his stubble.  The skin stung under his touch.  They didn’t seem to be healing.  “You really think it’s still me under there?”

“I do think it’s you,” she said, crossing her arms.  “I know you pretty well, Shepard.  It’s you.  But you are _stressed_.  You’ve been through so much, and you haven’t had time to process any of it.  Maybe that’s why your brain gives you nightmares.”  She held one hand up to her chin, thinking.  “Could you talk to Dr. Chakwas?  She could help you, couldn’t she?  And –”  She lowered her voice.  “You can trust her.  Garrus, Dr. Chakwas, Joker, me… you can trust all of us, Shepard.”

Shepard exhaled, the breath shivering across his lips.  “I’ve always trusted you, Tali.  You’re the first one I’ve told about… any of this.”

Her touch, light but sure, on his forearm again.  A gentle squeeze from two fingers and a long, delicate thumb.  “I hope it’s helping,” said Tali.  “Talking to me.”

Shepard gazed at her, then laid his hand on top of hers, giving it a quick squeeze before letting go.  “Yeah,” he said, “it is.”  He realized he did not just feel tired, but sleepy, too, an important distinction.  His eyelids felt heavy.

“You’re sleepy,” she commented, withdrawing her hand.  He gave a dull nod.

“Hey,” said Shepard, “I’ll take it.  If I can get a few more hours… it’ll help.  Just like you’ve helped.”  He managed a crooked smile.  “I’ll talk to Dr. Chakwas, too.  I know I should have talked to her from the beginning.  But I thought –”

“You could handle it,” finished Tali.  “I know.”

He snorted.  “You do know me pretty well.”  He got to his feet, and Tali joined him after tossing her wrappers in the trash.  “Heading back down to engineering?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Tali.  “There’s some maintenance I wanted to tackle before Kenneth and Gabby wake up.  They’ll be even more efficient today if I can get this taken care of.”  

They walked to the elevator.  “I’ll ride it down with you,” Shepard offered.  “If you want the company.”

She giggled at his suggestion.  “You do realize these elevators are much faster than the old Normandy’s?  I’ll be down there in just a second.”

“Still, though.  You might get lonely.”

She said nothing as the elevator doors opened, and for a moment as they stepped inside, he wondered if he’d said something wrong.  What was he doing, anyway?  He was supposed to be her superior, and here he was, burdening her with all of this –

The elevator doors opened again.  It really had been only a few seconds from the third floor to engineering.  “Goodnight, Shepard,” said Tali, and took his hand into a handshake, squeezing it.  “Remember our deal?  You worry about me, and I’ll worry about you.  I’m always here if you want to talk.”

He hesitated, remembering how this wasn’t the first time she’d talked him through something big; it wasn’t the first time she’d cared.  She was right there.  It would be such a small thing to pull her toward him, lift his arms, take her into an embrace –

But he didn’t want her to think he’d somehow used her, that he’d fed her some lines about being troubled and now wanted something besides a sympathetic ear.  Even if he did want that, now wasn’t the right time.  He stamped down on the feeling, and instead squeezed her hand back before letting go.  

Letting go was more difficult than he thought it would be.

“I remember,” he laughed, trying to hide the bluster in his voice.  “Goodnight, Tali.  Thank you.  You’ve helped me a lot.”

“My pleasure, Shepard.”  

She nodded to him and left the elevator, but Shepard scarcely noticed the way she walked to engineering with something like a skip in her step.  He was too busy tapping the button to take him back to his floor.  The elevator carried him upward, and he leaned against the wall, thinking, _Oh.  Oh, shit._

**Author's Note:**

> I! Just! Can't! With these two!


End file.
